Training Interventions: Why? How much? When?

Knowing when to intervene, and when to say nothing is one of the most valuable skills to have as a coach. Like all skills, you don’t wake up one morning with the ability to say the right thing at the right time, or more difficult yet, say nothing at all when nothing needs to be said. It takes deliberate trial and error and a lot of time to develop any skill, but particularly those interpersonal skills involved in coaching. You may have consumed every piece of training knowledge/advice available on the internet and spent countless hours polishing and refining your own understandings of different training phenomena but at the end of the day, you’re trying to run all of that through the hyper complex, sometimes randomizing filter that is another human being and all of their own beliefs, perceptions and experiences.
Maybe you’re reading this as an athlete, self-coached or otherwise and simply looking for information that you can apply to your own training, and I hope you’ll find that too:

Training Interventions: Why? How much? When?

To intervene is “to take part in something so as to prevent or alter a result or course of events.”
You might think of an intervention as a course correction, when a coach or self-coached athlete decides that something about your training warrants change. Some common things that tend to find themselves being cause for intervention are technical quirks in SBD bar paths, knee valgus, back rounding and certain competition specific execution issues that would potentially result in a red light such as downward movement of the barbell or negative training outcomes; Trialed a new exercise/frequency/dosage with a negative response.

The point of this piece isn’t to debate how warranted or appropriate any one intervention is, but instead to explore my opinion on best practice surrounding training intervention.

What Does High Level Performance Look Like?

In my opinion, these are the pillars of high level performance:

• Repeatability

• Consistency

• Confidence

As I will touch on further later in the article, you don’t want to use a deadlift technique that works well when you’re pulling 50% of your 1RM but loses all viability once you get north of 85%. Powerlifting is a game of skill as much as it is one of raw brute force. Being able to work through very similar movement patterns for an extended period of time is likely to be the difference between success and failure at high levels, this is where having a repeatable and consistent approach to each lift from setup to the performing of the lift is an invaluable element of performance.

The relationship between competence and confidence is a complex one often cited in the Dunning-Kruger effect that outlines a false sense of confidence when competence is low, often labelled “Mount Stupid” and a disproportionate lack of confidence as competence grows through intermediate stages of an endeavour. Powerlifters, like everyone, are subject to this phenomenon but in my opinion it is of utmost importance that powerlifters seek to develop confidence in their ability to perform the squat, bench press and deadlift as soon as possible. Given our repeated exposure to these exercises it is fair to assume that competence will likely be quite high in a relatively short period of time within the context of a powerlifting career and so confidence should rise to meet these levels of competence. Confidence in powerlifting is entirely intrinsic. Being confident doesn’t imply you are better than anyone else, it simply means you trust in your ability to lift an appropriately selected weight. This is something that should be considered from a coaching perspective both in your communications with a lifter and in your training prescriptions. Could you optimise training for lifter confidence somehow?

Confidence is the final stone in a Powerlifer’s infinity gauntlet.

Optimal Exists, Kinda…

Chasing optimal (like perfection) is almost definitely going to be an exercise in futility but that isn’t to say optimal doesn’t exist. I like to think of optimal as a line on a plane, and performance as another line that ebbs and flows over and back across optimal in a mostly unpredictable manner. The reality is that exactly optimal or a small deviation away from optimal can produce nearly indistinguishable results from a performance point of view and so it is probably more useful to view optimal as a range. Thinking back to that line on a plane image, the optimal range is going to be two lines that run parallel to the optimal line.

Figure 1

Deviations in performance are completely normal. We are not machines and so it would be unreasonable for us to expect that performance and movement quality would be a constant. To first understand what might be driving these deviations and how we should approach them we have to outline the goal. What are we actually looking for here?

In the context of powerlifting, the goal is to perform the squat, bench press and deadlift in a manner that allows you to move as much weight as possible while adhering to the rulesets of your federation, a fairly ubiquitous rule is squat depth; Bend your knees and lower your torso until the top of your leg (upper quad at the hip joint) is lower than the top of your knee.

Given that it is close to impossible to find your performance line running parallel to the optimal line indefinitely, it is inevitable that you are going to find yourself performing outside of the optimal range from time to time. At this point a cost/benefit analysis should occur; What could be causing this deviation?; Is there some confounding factor at play that is likely to affect performance quality? (e.g. poor sleep, high work/life stress, the presence of pain in training).
Or maybe none of the above are true, and you have simply found yourself falling short from a technical standpoint. You may have explored a certain direction on your squat technique such as taking a wider stance and focusing on pushing the knees out with good effect but somewhere along the line that focus started to negatively affect some other aspect of your squat technique.

The Smallest Effective Intervention

The beginning of best practice intervention is aiming for the smallest effective intervention (SEI). I particularly like this as it doesn’t necessarily infer the scale of intervention required, as the SEI may actually be quite a large one that takes a lot of time and iteration. However the goal remains, take the smallest action possible to address the perceived issue.

This is a surprisingly uncommon strategy however. Overcorrection is one of the most prominent issues in the approach to technique adjustments that I see in the wider powerlifting community. There seems to be a few causes for this;
Coaches want to coach. It’s often going to be in a coach’s nature to suggest a coaching intervention every time something that is perceived to be an issue pops up. Suggesting you do nothing and that an issue will resolve itself is a very difficult and often scary thing to do (also not very marketable);
Neuroses and the fear of missing out. FOMO can drive people to drastic action (see the billions lost on the cryptocurrency markets in Nov 2022) such as try the technique that worked well for their friend, change their technique in a major way because they noticed their favourite lifter on Instagram do so or, initiate the worst of all evils when it comes to technical intervention:

The dreaded “rebuild”

This course of action deserves its own cautionary paragraph. There are few things more damaging to your growth as an athlete of any level than the notion that you will somehow achieve a positive long term outcome or even at best that it will have been a net neutral use of your time and training resources to “rebuild” your technique. Using very light loads that barely register as a physiological stressor and moving them in a manner that fits an often misguided aesthetic will not transfer to your technical proficiency at top end loads to any meaningful degree, and definitely no more than standard training with appropriate loads. I have seen countless instances where individuals will drop all training loads to ~50% and spend 12+ weeks faffing about with movements patterns that look like their favourite lifter but do not suit them in the slightest. Only to add load to the bar and move in the exact manner that they moved pre-rebuild. It hurts to witness. You would do well to avoid entertaining the thought of a rebuild.

If you look at figure 1 above, you’ll notice that in this example, performance moves outside of the optimal range but it naturally moves back into the optimal range as performance ebbs and flows with the day to day lifestyle factors and all other uncontrollable factors that affect your training. No intervention was necessary. In figure 2 below you’ll see the presence of a correction at that point of deviation. Whatever the reason for intervention, simply waiting a little while would’ve provided the best outcome here. While there was no actual training intervention, this is very much in line with the goal of making the smallest effective intervention.

The vast majority of your training sessions will only be “ok” or average (as the name suggests). 

When the stars align from time to time for reasons both in and out of your control (whether you’re aware of them or not) you’ll have particularly good training sessions and/or stretches of training. As illustrated in figure 1, this would have your performance straddling alongside the shiny “optimal” trajectory. 

However, as most of your sessions will (by definition) be average, it makes sense that following a particular successful training bout, what follows will be comparatively shitty. Having experienced the euphoric highs of good training and PRs, average training sessions can feel like regression. 

This is analogous to the phenomenon of “regression to the mean”. In plain language, if most of your training is average, and you go through a period of great training, it follows that you will eventually go through a period of training that feels quite far from optimal. This is quite normal, and nothing to worry about.

Figure 2

Why? How much? When

Why? Pretty straightforward, you and/or coach think something warrants change in your training. There are plenty of things that could act as the driver for change; Is this thing likely to improve performance / increase training enjoyment / be a more suitable fit for current training demands. Your reasoning does not have to be rocket science, sometimes simply having a go at something novel is reason enough.

How much? As mentioned above, the smallest effective amount. Overcorrection is a very easy place to find yourself and if you talk to any long term powerlifter they will more than likely report the same thing; They wasted a whole lot of time changing too many things for reasons they can’t even remember. Developing enough mental fortitude to stick to that change you made for a block, or not change everything about the way you approach lifting because of an Instagram post you saw will do wonders for your training in the long run. Remember, every training decision doesn’t have to be a home run. Training is an iterative process, finding the smallest effective intervention may actually take a very long time, and that’s perfectly okay.

When? Rarely ever in close proximity to a competition. Like I alluded to at the beginning, confidence is one of the most important factors when it comes to success on competition day. Technical change and all the cueing that ensues is often the enemy of confidence. There are a few fringe cases where you might find yourself needing to make a change closer to comp or even on comp day but these are very much the exception not the rule.

Outside of competition preparations, I find changing as little mid-training block as possible to usually elicit the best results. I like to save interventions for the beginning of a block after some open ended discussion and collaboration with the lifter.

In my opinion, the best port of call is usually to sit back and enjoy the ride. Just as training drifted away from optimal for no apparent reason, it may drift back just as easily. For this reason and many more, enjoying the training process is incredibly important for a long and healthy career. In fact when I go through these phases periodically, what always seems to get me back to performing well in the gym is prioritising having a good time.

It doesn’t always make sense (it doesn’t have to), and we have far less control than we think. If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’re on the right track.